Closing date for applications: 25th April 2025
Salary: £27,000 pro-rata
Location: London
Term: Fixed-term
Curious about a career in book design? This paid summer internship offers emerging creatives the chance to work across three leading publishing design teams – Hachette Children’s Group, Octopus, and Little, Brown Book Group – and gain hands-on experience bringing books to life.
Hachette UK is a creative powerhouse and the UK's second largest book publishing group. Our mission is to make it easy for everyone to discover new worlds of ideas, learning, entertainment and opportunity.
We're made up of 11 autonomous publishing divisions and over 60 imprints with a rich and diverse history and an incredible range of authors. We're also the market leader in e-books and publish a range of bestsellers in audio format, the fastest growing part of our business.
For the past fifteen years Little, Brown have offered design internships, and over recent years have refined our summer internship to be industry-leading, with candidates going on to work in design roles across publishing.
Expanding on this, in Summer 2025 we are offering an exciting and unique opportunity for emerging creative talent to experience working in inhouse design teams for six weeks. This will offer a broad experience covering three design teams and their different areas of publishing, giving a full oversight of the industry and what it takes to take a book from concept to the shelves of consumers.
Hachette Children’s Group is one of the largest children’s publishers in the UK, creating bestselling and award-winning books. Publishing for every child across picture books, fiction, non-fiction and licensed brands. Octopus publishes a wide range of illustrated and non-illustrated books which include the genres Health, Memoir, Cookery, Interiors, Wellbeing, New Fiction, Drink and Gifting. Octopus are a truly international publisher, selling their books within the UK, and to publishing partners all over the world. Little, Brown Book Groups thirteen imprints have a market-leading presence in almost every area of the industry publishing literature of the highest standard, from prize-winning fiction to agenda-setting non-fiction and a range of prestigious classics.
What you'll be doing
You’ll become an active member of three divisional design teams (two weeks in each) across Hachette Children’s, Little, Brown Book Group and Octopus for the duration of the internship. The focus of your work during this time will be completing a series of live briefs as much as is feasible in the time. From first visuals, through the feedback stage and to have a final print-ready cover.
You will also be tasked with other jobs which would likely include:
- Shadowing designers on live projects,
- Attending cover visual and briefing meetings,
- Picture researching,
- Attending a photoshoot
- Art-working visuals to meet production standards
- Meeting colleagues in other key design-related departments (production, editorial, marketing)
Who we are looking for
We’re looking for an enthusiastic creative with a passion for design to learn more about the world of book design within a publishing setting.
We don’t require any specific qualifications or training. We ask for evidence of your passion for books and design, with a portfolio of work that demonstrates your creative skills.
Please include your CV, Cover Letter and Portfolio (which can be enclosed in the Cover Letter section).
What we offer
In Summer 2025, we are offering a six week paid internship to three candidates. The role is for four days a week (Monday to Thursday). The candidate will spend two weeks with each division: Hachette Children's Group, Octopus and Little, Brown Book Group.
The role is hybrid, with some home-working and suggested office presence (in our London office).
Hardware and software will be provided.
Our commitment
Hachette employs people on the basis of their abilities. We aim to attract and develop talent from a base as broad as the world of readers we want to reach, with a wide and representative range of age, faith, disability, race, gender, sexuality and socio-economic, regional and cultural backgrounds.
If you are shortlisted and need us to make any adjustments to help you attend for interview, please let us know.
The Book Trade Charity offers financial support to people looking to enter the book trade but who may struggle to afford the costs of attending interviews and undertaking junior roles. For more information visit www.booktradeentrysupport.org
Please include in your application that you found this role through Creative Access.
Level of experience
- Entry